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Have you tried reaching out to devs with similar games to see how they've done things in the past? NMS, X3 & X Rebirth, Elite, Rebel Galaxy, Space Engineers, Empyrion, etc., these are all games with strong similarities to LT, and in fact, LT is often mentioned along with them in articles that discuss these kinds of games.

Your name and your game have been out there for years, I'm sure they'd be willing to talk to you for an hour or so.

Those games do things very differently than what Josh wants to do with LT.

For instance in the X series of games by Egosoft. They simplify the economic simulation by having ships full of goods vanish or deliberately run into enemy sectors to be destroyed.

What Josh wants to do simply has not been done before at this scale. Atleast not in a video game. So I doubt the solutions they have found for their games will be of any use for Josh.

Have you tried reaching out to devs with similar games to see how they've done things in the past? NMS, X3 & X Rebirth, Elite, Rebel Galaxy, Space Engineers, Empyrion, etc., these are all games with strong similarities to LT, and in fact, LT is often mentioned along with them in articles that discuss these kinds of games.

Your name and your game have been out there for years, I'm sure they'd be willing to talk to you for an hour or so.

Those games do things very differently than what Josh wants to do with LT.

For instance in the X series of games by Egosoft. They simplify the economic simulation by having ships full of goods vanish or deliberately run into enemy sectors to be destroyed.

What Josh wants to do simply has not been done before at this scale. Atleast not in a video game. So I doubt the solutions they have found for their games will be of any use for Josh.

The closest we have are actually more or less 4X like games.
Likely the closest are paradox games, for scale and scope, if not the PCG.

I'll be honest, I expected part 2 to be "in the second half of the week, I spent time looking at the threading and shared memory Lua things the nice forum people showed me". I mean, it seems more logical to look at that before starting to write your own compiler, ya know?

Nevertheless, more reassuring words there than I have read about LT in a very long time.
So, beta next month?

Arclite wrote:
Have you tried reaching out to devs with similar games to see how they've done things in the past? NMS, X3 & X Rebirth, Elite, Rebel Galaxy, Space Engineers, Empyrion, etc., these are all games with strong similarities to LT, and in fact, LT is often mentioned along with them in articles that discuss these kinds of games.

Your name and your game have been out there for years, I'm sure they'd be willing to talk to you for an hour or so.

Asking the NMS devs for performance advice is like asking the Grinch for Christmas shopping tips

Don't make me want to make arbitrary predictions about how LT is 6 months from release and all that stuff. I get in trouble every time I do that, and silly statements like the above give me fuel for that fire.

Yeah it's worth pointing out this is isn't difficult because Josh doesn't know what to do, this is difficult because Josh know's all too well what to do and it's that difficult no-ones really tried it before to this extent.

I'm sorry if this has been discussed 1E9 times but it looks to me like you "just" need to separate real-time AI (fighting in the current system) from everything else ("universe" AI), i.e. AI that can run at a way slower resolution. Those two AIs could communicate via messages.

Example:
1. real-time AI sends a message to universe AI that a ship has been destroyed
2. universe AI decides that it needs to send reinforcements to current system
3. universe AI sends a "reinforcement arrives" message to real-time AI.

The point is that it doesn't really matter if reinforcements arrive 2s earlier or later. A delay would even add to perceived realism. The real-time AI could check for those messages if performance permits without having an impact on the FPS or the fighting at hand.

While real-time AI would need shared memory and highly optimized memory structure, the universe AI wouldn't need anything like that and could in fact even be running in a different process.

I'm pretty sure you already thought about this but it looks like such a big elephant in the room that I wanted to make sure that the trees aren't hiding the forest from you at this point...

huxi wrote:I'm sorry if this has been discussed 1E9 times but it looks to me like you "just" need to separate real-time AI (fighting in the current system) from everything else ("universe" AI), i.e. AI that can run at a way slower resolution. Those two AIs could communicate via messages.

Example:
1. real-time AI sends a message to universe AI that a ship has been destroyed
2. universe AI decides that it needs to send reinforcements to current system
3. universe AI sends a "reinforcement arrives" message to real-time AI.

The point is that it doesn't really matter if reinforcements arrive 2s earlier or later. A delay would even add to perceived realism. The real-time AI could check for those messages if performance permits without having an impact on the FPS or the fighting at hand.

While real-time AI would need shared memory and highly optimized memory structure, the universe AI wouldn't need anything like that and could in fact even be running in a different process.

I'm pretty sure you already thought about this but it looks like such a big elephant in the room that I wanted to make sure that the trees aren't hiding the forest from you at this point...

Eactly!

If I own 100,000 ships/stations in 1,000 different systems...my overall bank account should reflect their activities...but Faster than light communications should keep me from learning if I'm rich or poor!

Have a steady stream of news from your various factories/bases would be cool!